If Lucinda Winter has her way, one day Minnesota will be the home base for a TV series, the way New Mexico was for "Breaking Bad" and North Carolina is for "Homeland."

"We are very much trying to lure a scripted series here," says Minnesota Film and TV Board executive director Winter, who admits she was bummed the state was unable to attract the Emmy-nominated "Fargo" series, given that the movie version was shot here. "We talked to FX about it, but they had been planning that show for a long time and, at that point, there was just no way we could compete with the incentives in Calgary (where the series is shot)."

Lucinda Winters

The board has had recent successes, with recipients of its Snowbate incentive program ranging from TV's "Bizarre Foods" to the movie "Dear White People," a favorite at this year's Sundance Film Festival that will hit theaters this October. With Snowbate funding firmly in place -- $5 million in rebates available for the fiscal year that began two weeks ago -- at least Winter can get people to talk with her.

"When I started in 2005, I thought I knew what the job was," says Winter, a former board member of the organization who became its director at a time when it was barely receiving funding from the state. "I just started answering the phones and it became very clear right away that if we didn't get some incentive dollars, I was going to be very lonely."

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A pattern developed when Winter talked to producers in those days.

"They'd say, 'Do you have incentive dollars?' I'd say, 'No,' and they'd say, 'Thank you very much. Goodbye,' " recalls Winter, 56, a former writer and producer who had made use of film boards herself in such far-flung locales as India, Russia and Puerto Rico.

There still are plenty of movies that Minnesota has no shot at. Winter notes that Michigan recently nabbed the enormo-budgeted "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" by promising the producers $35 million in rebates, an amount Minnesota can't even come close to matching. But Minnesota can compete for more modestly budgeted movie and TV projects, which have the bonus that they are more likely to hire local crews and performers.

"We are talking to movies that have budgets around $15 million. That's a very significant spend over 12 or 18 weeks in an area of our size," Winter says. "And we're getting a lot of activity around TV. We have three or four production companies in our state that are taking advantage of Snowbate to attract networks like Discovery to work with them."

Still, ironies abound in the movie business. For instance, one reason Calgary was more attractive to producers of the "Fargo" series? Snow, which the show needed as early in the season as possible. Yes, apparently the snowy and freezing winter that Winter and other Minnesotans just withstood wasn't quite enough for "Fargo."

Q. What would you do if you had a million dollars?

A. After the last winter we all endured, at least part would be spent on my fantasy of somewhere, anywhere, with absolutely fabulous snorkeling and lovely fish and as much time to spend in the water staring at those fish as I wanted. My altruistic self, if I wasn't doing this job, I am very interested in service dogs and pairing them with veterans. I would run away for my little fishing trip and then work on that.

Q. Where is your favorite place to be?

A. In a theater.

Q. Who would play you in a movie?

A. Allison Janney. I'm a fan of her work, of course, but she is also able to walk that line between being very adaptable to whatever role she is playing and having this sardonic way of looking at things.

Q. What was your first job?

A. Working the early morning shift at a bakery in Michigan -- one of those bakeries that is buried inside a grocery store. I was the first person in every morning at 4. By 7, I smelled like doughnuts.

Q. What's the scariest thing you've ever done?

A. Waiting for a train in Delhi, India. It's just a different kind of travel. Delhi is a very large city and I'm one of those people who is not big on crowds anyway. It was extremely crowded and a lot of people there travel by train, so you're packed into this train. And where there's a lot of people, there's also a lot of critters.

Q. What are you thinking when you're about to make a pitch?

A. I'm always having to overcome assumptions and myths that people have about Minnesota. So I am usually thinking that I wish I could get in a time machine and move ahead to that point where it's very clear to them what we've got here and how easy it is to work here and why they should come here. I like pitching. Usually, I'm thinking, "Don't say too much. Listen," because I see it as an opportunity for me to overcome what they may perceive as the challenges of shooting here.

Q. When did you know you wanted to do this?

A. I really needed a new challenge. This was a tough one but, in a weird way, I was uniquely suited to it. I had been on the board of the St. Paul Red Cross and chaired that board, so I had been in the nonprofit world, and I understood production and also what a film board can do because I have used them. It just seemed like a weird intersection of a need for a certain kind of individual and me bringing that to the table.

Q. What's the best thing about your job?

A. It has provided me with the opportunity to get to know people I would never have met otherwise, from all walks of life. It's interesting to be at the intersection of so many different kinds of businesses and I like being in an industry at a time of real turmoil. It's adapt-or-die time.

Q. Who do you admire most?

A. Elizabeth Warren. I honestly think she has a lot of balls. Taking on the financial services industry and saying, "The emperor has no clothes," is very tough, and then she went from the frying pan into the fire, into Congress.